Editor's Note: This article comes fromOrange Book (ID: chengpishu), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Orange Book (ID: chengpishu)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLUWDLKAF1M）
Orange Book (ID: chengpishu)
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Li Yang asked me to write an article for the Prophet Weekly. The subject is not limited, as long as it is my own thinking. The things I have been paying attention to recently are a bit complicated, but there seems to be an invisible line. Maybe writing this article can help me sort out my thoughts.
A flexible electrode is an electrode thinner than a hair. It matches the soft brain tissue and can be implanted in the brain for a long time (this feature is very important) and attached to neurons (this feature is very important) to transmit clearly Information. Flexible electrodes and their implantation technology make the brain-computer interface no longer a science fiction, but a future within reach. (In this Neuralink experiment, the piglet was implanted with flexible electrodes, and the sound in the video reflected what its nose touched:
What does the future of brain-computer interface look like in the world of science fiction? There are two works that talk about two extremely pessimistic futures, respectively about the reading of information and the writing of information.
In the reading of the information, it is a novel called "Quantum Thief", which begins with the theft of consciousness caused by the theft of the private key of the pastry chef's brain. If we can't encrypt the output of the brain, the individual is controlled indirectly, which is why I think that various technologies that achieve data availability without exposing the data are important topics in the future.
In the writing of information, it is the episode of "Men Against Fire" in Black Mirror, which is a story of an input device tampering with the real world. If we abuse brain programming, the individual is directly controlled. How much information is allowed to be written is a big multiple choice question, and whether we can resist the temptation to write (big temptation, the temptation to slip into it) is unknown.
What does the future of the brain-computer interface look like in the real world? It may push human beings and human society further, even comprehensively, from the physical world to the digital world. Because by that time, the most important and overwhelming carrier of information will be numbers, not any other option.
Regarding the meaning of "information", Norbert Wiener has very inspiring insights. He believes that: "Any organism can maintain and survive because it has the means to acquire, use, preserve and disseminate information." And: "Like individuals, a social system is an organization held together by a system of communication".
If the carrier of information is digital rather than physical, then no matter whether it is an individual person or a human society as an organization, it is undoubtedly living in a digital world.
What is the biggest problem facing us as we enter the digital world? Maybe it's the lack of order. The history of mankind is also a history of order establishment. We have an order in the physical world, but we are far from establishing a new order in the digital world. Perhaps the most sensitive of these subjects is freedom. In the physical world, most individuals know the boundaries of freedom and freedom, and there are morals and laws to protect freedom and restrict freedom; but in the digital world, we are more likely to see two extremes.
At one extreme, freedom exists only in name. Zizek told a Soviet joke:
"A German laborer found a job in Siberia. He knew that writing a letter from there would not escape the eyes of the censor, so he made an agreement with his friend: If I write you a letter in blue ink, I will explain the letter to you. Everything on the website is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false. A month later, a friend received a letter from him, written in blue ink: Everything here is wonderful: the variety of goods, the food It’s rich and varied, the apartments are spacious and well-heated, the cinema is full of Western blockbusters, and there are lots of pretty girls to flirt with. Just one bad thing: the red ink is out of stock.”
At the other extreme, is absolute freedom. But is absolute freedom feasible in the digital world? Or a more realistic question, should "content" be completely unconstrained? This is also worth thinking about.
Bitcoin, currency, ledgers...they have no problem with anti-censorship, and the information will not harm other people; but the content may cause harm to others, not only the people involved in the content, but also those who see The influence caused by the people of these contents leads to some kind of actual harm, such as the blue whale game.
The former damage may be weakened by decoupling the identities of the physical world and the digital world, but the latter damage is inevitable. When we call for freedom, it is often from the perspective of the sender of the content, while ignoring the receiver of the content.
But where is the boundary of freedom and how to maintain the boundary, I don’t know; but talking about restricting freedom is like talking about “Hunting” in an environment where “me too” is far from being confronted and resolved. Is this kind of talk itself inappropriate? ? I have no idea.
Another topic related to entering the digital world is game and cooperation, because this important issue may also change due to digitalization and needs to be re-understood.
Humans are selfish, but human cooperation is possible and important. An important experiment to discuss the possibility of cooperation is Robert Axelrod's "Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma" game. He invited the world's most outstanding countermeasure experts to design strategies for repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games. These countermeasure experts come from economic Science, Sociology, Psychology, Mathematics, etc.
In the end, the winner of the game is the simplest strategy of all: tit for tat. That is, if the other party betrayed in the previous step, you choose to defect in this step; if the other party cooperated in the previous step, you choose to cooperate in this step. Robert invited more people to design strategies, and this time the participants knew that the winner was Tit for Tat last time, so they could design for this strategy, but in the end, the winner was Tit for Tat .
Tit for Tat reveals the possibility of reward-based cooperation, but this kind of cooperation has an important premise: "The evolution of cooperation requires that individuals have a large enough chance to meet again so that they can form a stake in future dealings" (Robert).
But in the digital world, is there a high enough chance for individuals or organizations to encounter each other again? Are the interests of future dealings more important than the interests of the present? If you abstract it a bit, is the digital world more of a world of stable environments or a world of changing environments?
If re-encounters are rare or do not depend on re-encounters, and an important prerequisite for cooperation is gone, where does the possibility of cooperation in the digital world come from, and what will the form of cooperation be like? How would effective ways of behaving or surviving in the physical world change without cooperation? For us in the DeFi world, whether it is a protocol designer or a protocol investor, these are already realistic considerations.
What does the future of brain-computer interface look like in the world of philosophy? Brain-computer interfaces provide a good, perhaps unprecedented, condition for us to think about what it is to be human, and what it is to think about what a machine/artificial intelligence is.
If both written information and output information can be replaced, what is left for human beings is to process information. The special feature of its processing is that when we make a decision based on the input and make an output, we will input the result of the output again (feedback) , and this feedback will be used as a factor to influence our next decision.
